This is my webpage. Maybe once I spring for php rights I will throw some kind of simple blog up here. For now, enjoy some links I've put up and a blog post from a previous blog.
So a bunch of guys from my floor came back from spring break with a Nintendo Wii. How fantastic. Now I can be introduced to the Wii and all it's motion control glory.
Except I was introduced to that glory eighteen months ago. I was with my high school clan when they bought Wiis the day the system was released. I experienced Wii Tennis Elbow for the first time a full year and a half ago. In short, I am suffering from Wii Ennui.
The recent highly anticipated release of Super Smash Brothers Brawl has only served to deepen my feeling of dissatisfaction it seems. By no means is it a bad game, it's certainly very fun. But a funny thing happened to me as I was playing this game- I looked down into my hands and saw not the iconic remote control, but instead one of my somewhat-less-iconic and timeworn wavebird controllers. Wavebird like from a Gamecube. This caused a realization in my head: "Hey! I bought this game a few years ago! It was called Super Smash Brothers Melee!" Sure, this game I was playing had more characters, and I could unleash and uber-powerful final smash by breaking a glowing, hovering orb, but I was still doing the same thing I had done every time I played Melee. It makes me wonder what the game was pushed back so much for, its not as if they had to make many changes to the game engine. If they did in fact rewrite the game engine, they did a really good job of making it as similar to Melee's as possible. Its not as if Melee wasn't fun, some of the best times I've had with a video game, particularly multiplayer, have been with Super Smash Brother's Gamecube incarnation. It's just that Brawl feels more the an incremental update instead of a new game, as if I was going out to get the latest Madden title, with an updated player roster. And honestly, can such a game really deserve the near-perfect scores that it is getting from the major gaming press?
The mention of Super Smash Brothers Melee brings up another point. Melee is probably the game I have spent the most time playing on my Wii since I received my own about a year ago. Yeah, for the first month, Wii Tennis and Golf were pretty cool, but after a while it just got old, and I went back to the old standby. The Wii just has not produced a great deal of compelling games. The Metroid game was pretty cool, but I don't think I ever finished it. Same thing with Super Paper Mario. I even bought Red Steel on clearance at a Target, just to try it out. It was terrible. Maybe it's because I am getting older and the Wii is supposedly being marketed towards a younger audience, maybe its because I haven't had the same amount of time to devote to games, maybe its because game programmers aren't used to the Wii's strange new control scheme. But regardless, the Wii just hasn't compelled me as much as I thought it would when it was announced.
These opinions about the Wii put me in a strange position when other people become excited about it. It especially makes me annoyed with people who buy a Wii for the first time and decide to explain to me how awesome it is. Sure, to them it's something new and exciting, but to me it is tired and played out. If only one person I knew was like this, it wouldn't be so bad. Everyone has some niche technology that they like to champion, I myself am quite partial to AMD's processors (Phenom Uber Alles!). However, few other pieces of hardware have the ability to turn people, even people who before had no interest in gaming or consoles, into rabid fanboys/girls. When these newly transformed people then go and try and explain to me how much of a technological wonder the Wii is, I can get very annoyed. Perhaps it is just because I am a bitter, disaffected young adult, but hearing someone explain to me how the Wii Remote works as if the last game console I had touched was the Atari 2600 for the umpteenth time can get just a little grating. And that is what my hallmates brought back with them from spring break. Goddamit.
Yeah, I am still working on getting this place set up. I think I am going to stick with this theme for the time being until I am confident enough to start creating my own. That picture with the bicycles and the palm tree doesn't really fit with the theme of the blog, so I think I whip something up with the same color scheme and slap it there instead. Probably this weekend when I have more free time. Until then, enjoy the random bicycling people.